Tasmanian Health continues to meet
We expect pressures on our health sector to continue but we will also be working hard to ensure essential services are maintained, writes Kathrine Morgan-Wicks
FOR more than two years, the health system in Tasmania worked hand-in-hand with our emergency management partners to help limit the impact of Covid-19 on the community. We did this, despite the significant economic and social impacts, to buy time while the global scientific community battled to develop and manufacture billions of doses of vaccine and anti-viral treatments to prepare the community for a mutating and more transmissible virus.
We knew that our protective measures would only last so long, which is why our health sector raced to vaccinate as many Tasmanians as we could, as soon as vaccine shipments hit our shores. We also used every single day we were Covid-free to prepare our health system as best we could.
Large-scale infrastructure (including RHH K-Block) has been built and commissioned, allowing us to open as many beds as possible; new virtual health technology has been adopted and public pathology laboratories have been upscaled to a level not seen before.
Covid has led Tasmanian Health to many firsts. It is the first time we have delivered more than a million vaccine doses to Tasmanians in just 15 months, reaching more than 99 per cent of the 12-plus population. For the first time, we have conducted half a million swab tests in a drive through environment, providing results direct to patient via SMS. We have seen the most health staff ever recruited, onboarded and trained in a two-year period, with more than 1350 full-time equivalent staff added on top of the public system workforce, not counting those we replaced due to retirements or career changes. The largest number of hospital beds have been commissioned due to these staffing increases, with more than 296 beds added to our state hospitals, moving us to 1656 hospital beds statewide. The most telehealth and virtual care devices have been commissioned, linking positive status and healthcare through a single SMS notification. And a vast hometest RAT distribution network was mobilised within days to respond to record pressure on laboratory testing.
Our front and backlines have been working tirelessly to keep all the wheels in motion in a landscape like no health